Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Branches For 1.0 RC1
At the end of last month, the Mozilla Project closed the tree for what will become Mozilla 1.0. Now jkeiser writes "Mozilla has branched for 1.0 RC1, which is the first last step to a final Mozilla 1.0! Mozilla has spent four long years getting the browser standards-compliant, fast and solid. Cross your fingers for a rockin' final release around the corner." Reader whovian points to the just-modified roadmap, too.
RC1 stands for Release Canditate 1. It's similar to a "beta" version, although much more mature than a beta would be.
:)
Hopefully the full 1.0 release is coming soon.
:wq
The most important feature in 1.0 is that the api will now be stable for the 1.0.x series. This means a lot to galeon & co. Nobody is saying that 1.0 will be perfect, but since mozilla is a good browser suite already, the 1.0.x series is liiking very promising.
OmniWeb isn't free (as in speech), but it's darn good, and using the browser of the underdog is a small step towards restoring competition to the marketplace, which is morally good (just like using OSS).
I recommend going to omni's website and trying it out.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
That's because Mozilla used to be the code name for Netscape.
However, modern-day Mozilla started out in 1998, when portions of the Netscape code were liberated. Since then, a lot of work on the code has been done, and what you have now is what is currently referred to as "Mozilla", the open source browser. Not to be confused with Netscape, i.e. the "old" Mozilla, which you are referring to as having heard about in '94.
RC1 comes out tentatively this week (I'm on the build and release team).
The strange result is that 1.0.3 is scheduled to be released about a month after the final 1.1. Are they really planning something huge for the 1.1 branch that they don't trust themselves to re-merge the tree? I guess there is precedent for this, with Netscape 4.08 being released after the 4.5 releases were well on their way. Also, it seems that this is how Linux kernel releases work, with 2.2 still being maintained after the release of 2.4. Still, this is a new policy for Mozilla.
First off, kudos to the Mozilla project team for getting this far... it's shaping up to be an excellent browser especially once you count the security track record of the opposition.
:).
One question I have as a DHTML web designer, is that will v1.0 fix the DHTML timing issues? The v0.98 changelog indicated that "DHTML performance has regressed", which I can verify is putting it lightly -- one of my animations that revealed a DIV via clipping worked fluidly in Moz 0.97 and hardly at all in Moz 0.99, which still hasn't patched it. Check out the "Popup Menu v5" script on my homepage on a slower computer if you want to see what I mean.
A quick search of Bugzilla reveals some articles also mentioning this issue. Does anyone know what plans are afoot to improve this?
I hope DHTML performance improves before this tree is used for another NS6 or AOL browser release, as otherwise it could render some of the more technically involved sites unviewable. If anyone's more involved in Bugzilla than I and knows the bug ID that most work is going into, please post a link to vote for it, otherwise try this one
Apart from that, I'm finding new Mozilla releases to be strides above the versions this time last year. Hopefully once fully mature it'll be the cross-platform web page development environment of choice... that's one area in which IE can never beat it, with the huge differences between IE on Windows and Mac.
More power to the lizard!
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
The 1.0 branch is long lived, but it has only just branched and has not stabilised yet. Nightly builds on this branch will be labeled with RC1 in the "About Mozilla" screen and user agent string. When drivers is happy that there are no major issues, and then the RC1 will disappear from the reporting string.
My business: Farstrider Studios.
You've not been paying much attention lately. It's fixed.
--Asa
OmniWeb was tested for its claim for web standards compatibility at A List Apart.
Basically they though it had great promise, but had a "long way to go before it can live up to its developers' claims to any sort of useful or meaningful CSS and DOM support."
"HTML is supposed to be a content distribution language, not a page layout language"
Isn't that a bit backwards? HTML is very much a "page layout language", and wouldn't you say XML is more for "content distribution", e.g. raw data?
- Oisin
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
Mozilla started out as an open source project in 1998. They released the code to a whole lot of hoopla, and people everywhere thought it was the greatest thing ever. Internet Explorer was starting to beat Netscape handily in terms of features and stability on the Windows platform, so this is how Netscape countered: by making sure that the open source community could have a hand at keeping the web from becoming yet another Microsoft-proprietary technology.
At first, I had no idea of the scope in the differences between Netscape 4.0 and what would become Mozilla; I thought Mozilla was going to be a smaller upgrade, maybe on the same level as the jump from Netscape Navigator 3.0 to Communicator 4.0. But instead, the project started from scratch, and here we are today, with a product that is mature in many ways (and severly lacking in others).
You can read Netscape's FAQ for some further information about it. Notice the references to Communicator 5.0, which has never been, and will never be, an existing product! Plus, Netscape is using their re-branded Mozilla build as Netscape 6, while Mozilla.Org has been naming their milestones with sub-1.0 version numbers up until now.
Actually, the simplest proof is:
0 0...
x=0.999...
10x=9.999...
-------------
9x=9.0
x=1
QED
The same principle can be used to convert any repeating decimal into a fraction without much difficulty.
ObMozBugComplaintBitchSlap
In 2 years of reporting 800 bugs, I've been told "fix it yourself" two or three times. Mozilla developers appreciate bug reports and most don't mind an occasional "I think this bug is important because...". If you just go around complaining "This bug has been known for x months" or "I can't believe you didn't fix obscure bug y, nobody will use your browser", you might get that response, but you're more likely to be ignored.
The shareholder is always right.
One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.
h elp/
Ctrl+L. For other shortcuts see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jruderma/mozilla/keyboard-
The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes.
What's wrong with incremental rendering? One thing that often annoys me when I use Opera is that it will download an entire 4MB page before displaying anything. Mozilla sometimes does that as well, but we consider it a bug (129640) when it does. Mozilla has an optimization that makes not display anything for the first 1.2 seconds of interpreting a page (unless it finishes in under 1.2 seconds), so once the first screenful of the page appears, you can usually read it while the rest of the page loads quietly.
The shareholder is always right.
That's why the tags in the core HTML describe content like <em> indicates that the text should be displayed with emphasis as opposed to the newer <i> tag that does something similar. HTML marks content with rendering hints, but it's not designed to be able to lay out a page. It's designed to describe rendering hints on a page. Any time HTML is used to lay out a page, it's using a bastardization of tables and using tags that have been removed in HTML 4.01 strict (and are merely deprecated in HTML 4.01 transitional).
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is designed to lay out a page. CSS can be applied directly to an XML document (in the spec, maybe not via any tools yet), and it can also describe the page layout. I'd point you to my website that uses CSS to lay out the page, but it's currently offline, so I'll just have to send you to the W3 CSS site. If you're using a CSS compliant browser (Mozilla is the best at rendering it properly but IE works - dunno about anything else), you should notice the menu and the various links scattered about the top of the page that are defined via CSS page lay out rules.
HTML as originally designed is intended to describe sections of a document. At some point, people started developing fancy webpages and HTML 3 was born which included a lot of page lay out tags. However, more recently, with IE 5 and Mozilla, CSS and HTML have taken over for page design, meaning that newer sites can be designed using HTML 4.01 strict with CSS describing how it should be displayed. (This is the preferred, "proper" method.) Historically, HTML was originally designed to define a page structure, delinating paragraphs and lists. With HTML 4.01 it returns to the ideal, while using CSS to allow for fancy page layout.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
jesser has covered keyboard access to the address bar. Thanks! I was wondering about that one myself.
As for speed, the UI chrome can be a little sluggish on a slower machine, but I find the HTML renderer to be quite swift.
rather slow loadup time
I use QuickLaunch and find startup quite reasonable. You can turn it on under Preferences->Advanced, or during installation.
there doesn't seem to be a way to turn on mouse gestures through the preferences
For now gesture navigation is an optional module that you need to install yourself by visiting the OptiMoz site. The installation is really painless, and you can configure or uninstall optimoz through the prefs panel. One caveat: the latest nightly builds seem to have changed some interfaces that OptiMoz uses, so the prefs are no longer visible, though I expect the OptiMoz project to have an updated release available soon.
And while it doesn't have mouse-wheel window switching...
...it does however allow you to configure the mouse wheel with a modifier key to scroll pages at a time, line at a time, change text size or go back and forward through history.
All the UI people are already screaming that Moz has too many prefs. I guess I wouldn't be hired for UI design since I like lots of configurability. I don't see a RFE bug in bugzilla to add switching windows using the mouse wheel, but you can search bugzilla yourself and if you're sure such an RFE doesn't exist, then add a bug.
Of course, RFE's are low on the totem pole right now...
Christopher
Mozilla
Ironically, Netscape 6.2 does work on MSNBC, including all the cascading menus/DHTML stuff. So it's purely due to MSNBC doing *incorrect* browser sniffing - looking explicitly for Netscape 6.x rather than for any Mozilla/Gecko-based browser.
I emailed them via their feedback form last week. Don't know if it will help, but since they *do* support the arch-competitor TWAOL Netscape-branded browser, maybe it was just a coding bug.
OTOH, I wonder what MS considers more of a threat? Another monopoly-style media/internet conglomerate like AOL Time-Warner, or the Open Source movement? Maybe supporting branded-Netscape but not Open Source Mozilla is deliberate...
Then you come along and notice "Hey, yesterday that guy poo-poo-ed Mozilla, but today this other guy said it was good. What gives?"
Well clearly what gives is that you think this is the same person when in fact it is different people saying different things.
SIDE NOTE: Complaining about how Slashdot people are inconsistant is just STOOPED. There is not one voice here, there are many. If you came to compalin about inconsistancy, then track one person and look for inconsistancy.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I hope it will be...but there are a couple of serious gray areas that need fixing:
I've been using Moz for a couple of years and I love it, but I can't understand why these two areas are still outstanding. Does no-one print from Mozilla?